Notes

Painted in the garden of Roedean School, Johannesburg, in the summer of 2018/2019, on site, in situ, plein air.

The proceeds from the sale of this lot will benefit the Roedean School Bursary Fund.

This panel, with five flowers from the beautiful gardens of Roedean School for Girls in Johannesburg, is part of Schönfeldt’s larger body of work, Documentary Stills, in which he draws up an inventory and creates a sense of order and a system of identification and interpretation. In each of Joachim Schönfeldt’s painted panels, an interlacing wooden strip coils infinitively around upon itself, enclosing five convex, circular shields on which five different vignettes are painted. In the present Lot, the artist has painted five different flowers from the school’s gardens, tended for over 35 years by the indefatigable garden expert Anne Lorentz. Included are (from top, clockwise) Azalea, Rosa Roedean, Dianthus, Ruttya Ruspolia Phyllis Van Heerden and the Anne Lorentz rose. The flowers reference the diversity, youth and promise of the girls who attend the school, as well as the natural rhythms of life and society beyond the campus.

Schönfeldt painted the flowers from life, en plein air, that is, out of the studio, following a practice pioneered by the Barbizon school of painters in nineteenth-century France, and made possible by the invention of paint tubes by Windsor & Newton in 1841, and the portable easel, first displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.